20131117

The USS Zumwalt getting a coat of paint at
Bath Iron Works. The ship is exotic in many ways, but it runs on
off-the-shelf computing technology.

General Dynamics Bath Iron Works

When the USS Zumwalt (DDG 1000)
puts to sea later this year, it will be different from any other ship
in the Navy's fleet in many ways. The $3.5 billon ship is designed for
stealth, survivability, and firepower, and it's packed with advanced
technology. And at the heart of its operations is a virtual data center
powered by off-the-shelf server hardware, various flavors of Linux, and
over 6 million lines of software code.

On October 10, I flew up to Rhode Island to visit Raytheon's Seapower
Capability Center in Portsmouth, where engineers assembled and
pre-tested the systems at the heart of the Zumwalt and are preparing to
do the same for the next ship in line, the USS Michael Monsoor—already
well into construction. There, Raytheon's DDG-1000 team gave me a tour
of the centerpiece of the ship's systems—a mockup of the Zumwalt's
operations center, where the ship's commanding officer and crew will
control the ship's sensors, missile launchers, guns, and other systems.

Over 20 years ago, I learned how to be a ship watch stander a few
miles from the Raytheon facility at the Navy's Surface Warfare Officer
School. But the operations center of the Zumwalt will have more in
common with the fictional starship USS Enterprise's bridge than it does
with the combat information centers of the ships I went to sea on. Every
console on the Zumwalt will be equipped with touch screens and software
capable of taking on the needs of any operator on duty, and big screens
on the forward bulkhead will display tactical plots of sea, air, and
land.

Perhaps it's appropriate that the first commanding officer of the
Zumwalt will be Captain James Kirk (yes, that's actually his name). But
considering how heavily the ship leans on its computer networks, maybe
they should look for a chief engineer named Vint Cerf.

Off the shelf and on the ship

In the past, you couldn't just put off-the-shelf computer systems
aboard a ship for mission critical tasks—when I was aboard the USS Iowa,
we had to shut down non-tactical systems before the guns were fired
because the shock and vibration would crash systems hard. So typically,
individual computer systems are ruggedized. But that adds heavily to the
cost of the systems and makes it more difficult to maintain them.

The design of the Zumwalt solves that problem by using off-the-shelf
hardware—mostly IBM blade servers running Red Hat Linux—and putting it
in a ruggedized server room. Those ruggedized server rooms are called
Electronic Modular Enclosures (EMEs), sixteen self-contained, mini data
centers built by Raytheon.

Measuring 35 feet long, 8 feet high, and 12 feet wide, the 16 EMEs
have more than 235 equipment cabinets (racks) in total. The EMEs were
all configured and pre-tested before being shipped to Bath, Maine, to be
installed aboard the Zumwalt. The EME approach lowered overall cost of
the hardware itself, and allows Raytheon to pre-integrate systems before
they're installed. "It costs a lot to do the work in the shipyard,"
said Raytheon's DDG-1000 deputy program manager Tom Moore, "and we get
limited time of access."

Each EME has its own shock and vibration damping, power protection,
water cooling systems, and electromagnetic shielding to prevent
interference from the ship's radar and other big radio frequency
emitters.

The EMEs tap into the Total Ship Computing Environment, the Zumwalt's
shipboard Internet. Running multiple partitioned networks over a mix of
fiber and copper, TSCE's redundantly switched network system connects
all of the ship's systems—internal and external communications, weapons,
engineering, sensors, etc.—over Internet protocols, including TCP and
UDP. Almost all of the ship's internal communications are based on Voice
Over IP (with the exception of a few old-school, sound-powered phones
for emergency use).

Enlarge/ A diagram of the Zumwalt's control systems and their connections to the Total Ship Computing Environment.

There's also some wireless networking capability aboard the Zumwalt,
but Raytheon officials giving me the tour were not at liberty to discuss
just what sort of wireless this is. Still, that capability is supposed
to allow for roving crew members to connect to data from the network
while performing maintenance and other tasks.

Systems that weren't built to be wired into an IP network—other
"programs of record" within the ship, which are installed across
multiple classes of Navy ships—are wired in using adaptors based on
single-board computers and the Lynx OS real-time Linux operating system.
Called Distributed Adaptation Processors, or DAPs, these systems
connect things like the ship's engineering systems, fire suppression
systems, missile launchers, and radio and satellite communications gear
into the network so they can be controlled by networked clients.

It looks like you want to launch a missile

Enlarge/
The mock-up of the Zumwalt's operations center at Raytheon's Portsmouth
facility, complete with haze-gray paint, has the exact dimensions of
the space on the ship itself. The Zumwalt will include a second level to
host the operations of units deployed with the ship.

Some of those networked clients were what I was looking at in the
mocked-up Zumwalt operations center. The operations center isn't just
where screens are watched and commands are shouted—the whole ship can be
practically run from the space, from guns and missiles to engines.
There's no "radio room" on the Zumwalt; all the communications are
managed from the operations center. The ship's guns are fully automated
and operated by an operations center watch stander instead of a gunner's
mate in the mount. Theoretically, the ship could even be steered from
the ops center—the ship is piloted by computer, not a helmsman. And all
of these tasks are performed from the same type of console.

Enlarge/
The Mark 57 vertical launch system, developed by Raytheon, can carry a
mix of anti-ship, anti-aircraft, and land attack cruise missiles. It
communicates with the operations center over the ship's network.

Called
the Common Display System, or CDS (pronounced as "keds" by those who
work with it), the three-screen workstations in the operations center
are powered by a collection of quad-processor Intel motherboards in an
armored case, which gives new meaning to the nautical phrase "toe
buster." Even the commanding officer's and executive officer's chairs on
the bridge have CDS workstations built-in.
Each CDS system can run multiple Linux virtual machines atop
LynuxWorx's LynxSecure, a separation kernel tthat has been implemented
in CDS as a hypervisor. This allows the workstation to connect
to various networks partitioned by security level and purpose. "Every
watch stander station runs out of the same box," Raytheon's DDG-1000
developer lead Robert Froncillo told me. "So they can sit at any CDS and
bring up their station."

This may not seem like a big deal to most people. But on past ships,
workstations tended to be purpose-built for a specific weapons system or
sensor. That meant every system had a different configuration and
interface, and you couldn't have a watch stander handle multiple tasks
without having to switch seats. The CDS workstation uses common USB
interfaces for its peripheral devices (such as trackballs and
specialized button panels) and is equipped with touchscreens, as well,
so that watch standers have a choice between "classic" and touch
interfaces.

That doesn't mean there's necessarily a "Clippy" to help new
operators master their systems. The Raytheon team has had sailors in to
perform usability assessments from before code was even written, showing
them screen shots of interfaces to get feedback from users. "We had a
chief that said, 'We don't want any 'wizards,'" said Froncillo.

A
digital illustration of how the Zumwalt's operations center will look,
complete with its second-level suite for hosting operations for air
detachments and other units deployed aboard.

Raytheon

Putting all of the pieces together is a collection of middleware
running on those IBM blade servers. Many of the shipboard systems use a
commercial publish/subscribe middleware platform to send updates to
operator consoles. But for other systems that need to be more tightly
coupled (like, for example, missile launch commands), the Navy has
specified the use of the Common Object Request Broker Architecture
(CORBA)—the military's favorite mission-critical middleware model. (The
software for the Joint Tactical Radio System's software-defined radios
was also developed using CORBA.)

The next release

The Zumwalt may not have sailed yet, but its software has already
shipped six times. When Release 5 was completed, Raytheon brought in
more sailors to test the system, tethering it to the company's Total
Ship System Simulator to run through a number of combat scenarios. "We
did antisubmarine warfare, air, and land attack missions," Froncillo
said. The lessons learned were incorporated into release 6, and 7 will
be installed on the ship before the ship's "shakedown" cruise. Another
upgrade will be installed post-delivery, and continual improvements will
be made as the software is deployed to the other two ships in the
class.

But the life of the technology being deployed on the Zumwalt won't
end there. CDS will be used as part of the Navy's Aegis Modernization
Program to upgrade the systems of the fleet's guided missile cruisers
and destroyers. "And there are a lot of things we're developing that
will be reused," Moore said.

Considering how much has been spent over the past decade trying to
get the Zumwalt built, and the other technologies that were developed in
the process, one can hope that more than just the software gets some
reuse.